I Don't Get Jeff Atwood

gga

I read quite a few blogs, on different topics, but there is
(obviously) a whole bunch of computing ones in there. I read some of
the big name ones, like Joel
on Software and The
Old New Thing, as well as some that could possibly be regarded as
second-tier in the blagosphere
like Intertwingly
and Steve Yegge.

His posts appear pretty often
on programming.reddit.com
or digg.com, friends (who I respect)
read him and recommend his articles, but I just can’t figure him
out. Sometimes his articles manage to completely miss the point, and
other times he reasonably succinctly describes a simple concept.

For example, the post Building
a Computer the Google Way contains an historically interesting
photo of Google’s first server. This server is interesting because it
is fairly clearly a cobbled together set of home-built servers with
some custom designed hardware. These servers were built by Google
from the PCB under the motherboard on up. Sure, they used commodity
parts, but I can guarantee there are some unique pieces in
there. Probably in the vicinity of the interconnects.

This is an interesting example of how a successful company will
control everything that possibly relates to their business. You can’t
afford to rely on the off-the-shelf components for anything that might
be technically critical. For Google, indexing and querying speed were
hyper-important. So they built their own hardware. Amazon did
something similar when they wrote their
own web
server. Always remember these example when you’re railing
against Not-Invented-Here
syndrome.

Unfortunately, Coding Horror proceeds to use the Google example as
justification for why every good programmer should build their own PC
instead of just buying one from Dell. I’m sorry, but I can’t see how
reading specs on PCI slot counts on a motherboard are going to lead to
building the kind of server that could support Google’s load, or
perform their proprietary indexing any faster.